1. No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often
far mote) worth reading at the age of fifty—except, of course, books of
information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which
it would have been better nor to have read at all.

2. Where the children’s story is simply the right form for what the author has to say,
then of course readers who want to hear that will read the story or re-read it, at
any age. I never met The Wind in the Willows or E. Nesbit’s Bastable books till I
was in my late twenties, and I do not think I have enjoyed them any the less on
that account. I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story
which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.

3. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had
been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a
man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to
be very grown up.

4. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and
dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will
persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond
what it wants, and needs, to feel. For, of course, it wants to be a little frightened.

5. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed
when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots
along in obedience to a time-table.

6. And I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child
life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the
terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them
endurable. For in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the
immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones; and the terrible figures
are not merely terrible, but sublime.